Parkway Drive Have Their Sights Set On Being Metal's Next Arena Headliners

[Celerity]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quentinsinger/2022/09/09/parkway-drive-have-their-sights-on-being-metals-next-arena-headliners-and-you-should-too/?sh=13b546fb4e60

https://archive.ph/aloxj



Australia’s own Parkway Drive are an undeniable force in the current heavy music landscape. Having earned their stripes in the early 2000’s metalcore scene, PWD have since gone on to become a household name within modern metal and possibly take the throne as the genre’s next heavyweight headliners. With their 2015 album IRE, the band embarked on this ambitious journey to go beyond their metalcore roots and aim for a sound that resonates with larger audiences and consequently bigger venues. However, the band’s formidable drive would only be fully realized with their 2018 album Reverence, which eventually led to them headlining one of the biggest metal festivals in the world, 2019’s Wacken Open Air. Now nearly three years later, Parkway Drive have channeled all this momentum into what’s undoubtedly the most important milestone of their career — their seventh studio album Darker Still.

Provided all the success the band’s seen over the past two album cycles, it was inevitable that Darker Still would be the band’s climactic return, especially considering the album’s conception was during the world wide pandemic. However, to no one’s expectation it was almost the band’s breaking point as well. This past spring PWD were set to hit the road on a highly anticipated North American headlining tour featuring the likes of Hatebreed, The Black Dhalia Murder, and Stick To Your Guns. A month before the tour started PWD posted a statement announcing the cancellation of all dates and that they were taking time to work on internal issues as a band and as individuals, but they reassured fans that their return would “burn brighter than the past.” To that end, today marks the official release of Darker Still and if there’s one thing for certain it’s that the future does in fact look brighter than ever for Parkway Drive. In speaking with Forbes, Parkway Drive frontman Winston McCall details the conception of Darker Still and why it ended up being one of the most difficult and triumphant periods in their 20 years as a band.

On top of Darker Still coming out, you all are embarking on your first European tour in nearly 3 years. What has prepping for both of these massive milestones been like, especially given it’ll be the band’s first tour in this new landscape?

WM: It’s hectic [laughs]. It’s pretty weird because with not having done a tour for three years you realize what momentum actually means in the sense of muscle memory and having systems in place that you were used to operating in, and going from a full on cold start back into touring mode, essentially we’ve never done that ever. We’ve just been going and building momentum from day one, so this is pretty nuts trying to get it all started again and get it all back to the place where it actually was, which is pretty insane in the first place. Then at the same time we have a record rollout going on as well, so everything is just going at 100 miles per hour. Our brains are fried but in a good way, we’re really really excited. The reality of how much work goes into it was kind of lost on me previously when I was doing work.

This record is obviously different from the last in a number of ways, while of course it still bears the band’s signature sound. However, was there a conscious decision in where you wanted to take this record both sonically and lyrically?

WM: There was definitely an intent. Basically when we finish writing a record we immediately know what we want to start doing the next time. We know what we liked about the previous work that we put down and also what we hadn’t achieved and what doors we hadn’t walked through. We had already said we’re only going forwards and Reverence (2018) was an experience of creating something sonic where we’re like, we love the steps we took forward but we’re still going to continue going forward, this isn’t the end point. Then COVID hit and that was the circuit breaker for music in general. That was the thing where all of a sudden you didn’t even have time to focus on any kind of art, like the first couple of months was ‘oh my god the world’s going to end, reassess your entire life.’ So when we finally came back on the other side of it it took us six months of easing into this thing and the reality of ‘it’s going to be a couple years before we’re going to be touring again,’ and then the interest for writing took hold.

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